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A Message from
Education Action: Toronto November 6, 2012 Building Inequality at The TDSB The Province Has a Lot To Answer For The Mussolini in Bill 115 Ontario Teachers Waiting For a Strike The Quebec Student Protests The Chicago Teachers Strike Teaching for Social Justice |
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Whatever the issue, It's what happens to the kids that counts At Education Action: Toronto we continue to stress that the core of the neo-liberal assault on public education is the production of what the premier and his chief education advisor (Michael Fullan) call "human capital." The curriculum pressure on kids to become human capital is, for example, what standardized tests are designed to support. Their central purpose is to police and frame a gutted, fragmented curriculum that doesn't allow children realistically to imagine a future beyond the job slots and lifestyles of global capitalism. It's a program that offers no human "expectations." And the human capital that is the focus of public schooling is not general in nature but rather the low-level variety that applies to working-class kids (especially those who are poor and racialized). What our top school officials (and those who control them) are really aiming to produce — however much they deny it — is a docile and uncritical working class. This is a fundamental requirement in keeping capitalism alive. There remains, of course, an enormous store of misleading bureaucratic rhetoric about our public school system emphasizing "caring" and "quality" for all our children. As most of us know in our bones, such language is as "big" a lie as our society has to offer. At the same time, these officials understand that those in the middle class or above who aren't happy with such a low-level focus in public education (and can't effectively shift the emphasis in their neighbourhood schools) can move on, with their tacit blessing, to the private system. The public schools can be left to disintegrate as places of genuine learning. In the daily life of our school system it's not always easy to be clear just how this human capital focus operates. In part, this is because such a focus is often undercut by caring teachers and school-board workers, who resist (often in hidden ways) what they are asked to do — from what they teach and how they test to interaction with students and their parents. Such teachers and school-board workers remain open to their students and to the human substance of what they teach. They try to act on that. So what goes on in the classroom can still matter, can still run against the grain of Ministry memos, can still encourage kids to explore the world under the official curriculum radar. At the same time, however caring and thoughtful our teaching staff may be, whatever happens in their classrooms remains profoundly shaped by government policy, especially in working-class schools. The pressure is always on — to pay attention to hundreds of fragmented "expectations," to raise empty test scores, to file more irrelevant and distracting reports, to operate within official profiling and social class- and racially-biased streaming, to press more kids into Individual Education Plans, to stay away from genuine community involvement, to knuckle under to administrative dictates and to give up any hopes for local teacher democracy in the workplace. It's a lot of pressure. And how much this pressure is resisted by school staff is hard to say. Certainly, most working-class kids (particularly if they are poor or racialized) don't finish their education as happy campers and school supporters. Whatever resistance is going on in our schools and however difficult it is to analyze this struggle clearly, it's essential we keep in mind the "human capital" perspective of the Ministry of Education. And not just on the classroom front. The emphasis on shaping human capital provides the primary ground of Ministry policies around money and power. This point is hard to remember sometimes, but controlling education money and decision-making is fundamental in determining how school-based human capital is to be shaped, though various privatizing initiatives may wander somewhat from this focus. That's why the issues of education money and power are taken so seriously at Queen's Park. The need to shape a governable/manipulable working class is how best to understand the 200-year-old provincial assault on local education governance in Ontario. Ontario school boards are now on their last legs; it's hard to imagine they can survive for another decade. And local school councils are a bad joke in dealing with any substantive classroom issues. Read Michael Fullan's Change Forces With a Vengeance if you think we're exaggerating this continuing human capital thrust and its growing ruthlessness in trying to control all aspects of education. It's also important that we recognize that the broader issues of money and power — especially the front-burner issue of money — are solidly linked to the classroom/school experience of our students, teachers, parents and community. This is especially true in working-class neighbourhoods. When these actors in our educational system look at the issues of money and power, they see them as key to what happens to kids in classrooms and how parents and community are treated. Indeed, struggles around money (as in the current Ontario teacher contract struggle or the Quebec student tuition protest or inner-city parent demands for more resources) are never just about money. The anger in this resistance is fueled by a deeper experience of our educational system, and the political organization that emerges inevitably finds itself reaching out to allies on a wide range of social justice fronts. A great many money issues are taken on, at least in part, as a substitute for being stymied on issues that are closer to our hearts and mean more to our children. It's this perspective that is central in approaching the articles in this issue of Education Action: Toronto's Message. David Clandfield's careful analysis of inner-city funding at the Toronto District School Board shows how most provincial money, supposedly earmarked for poor children, goes elsewhere and that private fundraising wipes out what's left of the equalizing effects of inner-city weighting factors. The point here is not simply that schools in poor neighbourhoods don't get enough money, but that schools in wealthier neighbourhoods end up with a lot more. It's the inequality that really rankles, because it is linked with the social-class and racial divisions that marginalize inner-city children not just in school but in the society around them. From the Campaign for Public Education, Janet Bojti's article shows another side of McGuinty's "austerity" cutbacks — closing down neighbourhood schools while blowing money on unworkable monster schools and squeezing school staff and services. Here again, the issue is not just money and what it offers in good service provision. Whole neighbourhoods (mostly poor ones) are adversely affected with the loss of their school as a community centre and as a more intimate place for student learning. A third dimension of the provincial cutback agenda can be found in the government's recent assault on teacher bargaining rights, leading up to a more general assault on public-sector bargaining. Our public elementary and secondary teacher federations have so far hung tough in this battle, refusing to give in to provincial threats to force them back to work. What's clear is that the energy for an extended struggle must have its source in much more than a legitimate concern for a decent pay packet or a right to fair collective bargaining. Ontario's teachers and school-board workers are increasingly demoralized about what is happening to their work with children, increasingly aware of how powerless they have become in trying to make their schools better places for both kids and educators. Here's hoping their unions can harness this concern during the current contract struggle and lead their membership into direct outreach to their parents and community, with the provincial government as the clear target. A genuine reform package has to be at the centre of this outreach. Parents and communities need to know that more is at stake than teacher/schoolboard worker bargaining rights, however important they may be. And the current fragmentation of local activism — particularly when it appears to be hostile to parent and community interests — can't be allowed to continue. In this context, Dudley Paul opens up the "Mussolini" in Bill 115, while Doug Nesbitt and Andrew Stevens provide a very helpful backgrounder to this struggle. The growth of labour and student support for our teachers is especially important here. The articles bringing you up to date on the Quebec Student Tuition Protest and the Chicago Teacher's Strike provide two extraordinary examples of how battles that appear rooted in monetary issues can blossom into much wider struggles for a whole range of social justice issues. As the spokespersons for the student organization CASSE put it, "This has always been the essence of our strike and our mobilization: a shared, collective vision whose scope lies well beyond student interests. In our campuses, in our workplaces, in cities and villages across our province, people have come together like never before: to talk, to debate, and to imagine a new society with us. And we are making new alliances, overcoming old divisions, all across Canada." In Chicago, the teacher union president, Karen Lewis, understood (as did her wide-ranging supporters) that her union's strike was "part of a wider battle over the soul of public education." In direct opposition to the neo-liberal thrust touched on in these articles, Deirdre Kelly's very helpful piece from British Columbia in Our Schools/Our Selves introduces social justice teaching in five major areas: cultural imperialism, marginalization, systemic violence, exploitation, and powerlessness. You can connect more fully to her work through her website at http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v08n03/toc.html. We should also mention the efforts of the Provincial Specialist Associations within the British Columbia Teachers Federation to develop an alternative and engaging curriculum. You can reach them at: http://bctf.ca/PSAwebsites.aspx. There are 33 of these associations, whose focus ranges from aboriginal education, through primary teaching, social science and science, to dance and music. They give you a good sense of how classroom teachers can come to grips with serious curriculum concerns. We've also attached below education demands that emerged out of discussions with the Rexdale Somali community. In the context of the government's human capital thrust, the focus of these community demands seems to us exactly where it should be. Don't forget to check out our website www.educatonactiontoronto.com for policy statements and back articles. In solidarity, George Martell and Faduma Mohamed Co-chairs, Education Action: Toronto |
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Education Demands from the Rexdale Somali Community
These education demands emerged over the last few years from discussions with Rexdale's Somali community. Yes, decent resources are important, but it's what happens to the kids in the classroom — the respect they are given, the engagement they are offered — that counts the most. There are seven of these demands: 1. Focus on engaging our children in substantial intellectual and creative work. Make sure that what they study really matters to them and to their communities. Don't lower your standards. Far too often it is assumed our children aren't capable of strong intellectual and creative performance and what's mostly needed is more recreation and social work. Don't sell our children short. 2. Stop the bottom streaming of so many of our children. Keep all children in the regular class — in elementary and in high school. For those students who are behind, "individualize" their program to bring them into the main classroom program (don't put them into IEP's) and provide them with good tutors. 3. Treat all our children as full human beings. Don't profile them with misleading "medical" or "scientific" labels. Assume they are all capable of serious intellectual and creative work. Give our classroom teachers the freedom to make this assumption and to focus on exploring the world with their students and engaging their deepest interests. Don't hold our teachers back with hundreds of small curriculum fragments (or "expectations") to teach to. 4. Assess our children by looking at the work they do and focus on strengthening the quality of this work. Don't test them with standardized tests or encourage their teachers to raise test scores rather than deepening student learning. 5. Give parents and teachers and interested community members the authority and the resources to deal with key school discipline issues through the school council — to make our schools safe, orderly and caring places. These groups should be central to making the key decisions on how our schools are governed. The police should not be involved in our schools in any way; that is not their role in the society. 6. Give parents and teachers and interested community members the authority and the resources to develop a program through the school council in which teachers and community get to know each other better. Such a program would take on the issues of racism and classism in a concrete way, without empty moralizing. 7. Provide all children with regular and complete medical check-ups and ensure immediate attention for any health problems discovered. Recent assessments in children's health at the TDSB suggest widespread health problems, including poor eyesight and hearing. These problems deeply undercut children's chances of success in school. |
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Deepening Inequality At The TDSB David Clandfield A year ago, Education Action expressed cautious satisfaction that the budget for Model Schools for the Inner City at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) had survived a threat to have it chopped or seriously pruned during the 2011 round of budget cuts. Remarkably, it survived again in 2012 as the cuts gradually became deeper. But now as the plans get under way to cut even further, inner-city education is back on the chopping block for the 2013 budget. The neo-liberal argument will be that schooling for the poor and racialized communities will now have to shoulder its share of the deficit just like the programs in schools for all the wealthier neighbourhoods. Pressure to keep taxes down provincially and to balance budgets locally means, we are told, that no school communities can be spared the pain. It is, after all, only fair. But the evidence, once we have assembled it from public sources, shows that this is not fair at all. The gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is not going to stand still as provincially-led austerity is imposed on school boards. It is going to grow. This becomes spectacularly clear when we revisit the issues of public grants for schools that serve poorer, racialized neighbourhoods and private fundraising that supports public schools largely in more affluent neighbourhoods.
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The Province Has a Lot To Answer For
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The Mussolini in Bill 115
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Ontario Teachers Waiting For a Strike
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| Major Victory for Quebec Students, Environmental Activists
Richard Fidler Their demonstrations have shaken Quebec in recent months, and yesterday [September 20th] students and environmentalists won major victories. At her first news conference as premier, Pauline Marois announced that her Parti Québécois government had cancelled the university tuition fees increase imposed by the Charest Liberal government, and would repeal the repressive provisions of Law 12 (formerly Bill 78) Charest had imposed in his efforts to smash the province's massive student strike. Among other things, this will remove the restrictions on public demonstrations and the threat of decertification of student associations. In addition, Marois has ordered the closing of Gentilly-2, Quebec's only nuclear reactor, while promising funding to promote economic diversification to offset job losses resulting from the shutdown. And she will proceed with her promise to cancel a $58-million government loan to reopen the Jeffrey Mine, Quebec's last asbestos mining operation.
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Just the Beginning:
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'Class' Warfare:
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7 Days that Shook Chicago:
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Teaching for Social Justice
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This email was sent by Education Action: Toronto 1698 Gerrard St. East, Toronto, On. M4L 2B2 |